Course for Young Doctors

Young Doctors Course: Bridge Lecture 2: The Moral as the Source of World-Creative Power

Schmidt Number: S-4318

On-line since: 10th September, 2008

The Moral as the Source of
World-Creative Power

December 18, 1920

I tried yesterday to give certain
indications about the constitution of the human being, and at
the end it was possible to show that a really penetrating
study of human nature is able to build a bridge between the
external constitution, and what it unfolds through
self-consciousness, and the inner life. As a rule no such
bridge is built, or only very inadequately built,
particularly in the science current today. It became clear to
us that in order to build this bridge we must know how the
human constitution is to be regarded. We saw that the solid
or solid-fluid organism — which is the sole object of
study today and is alone recognized by modern science as
organic in the real sense — we saw that this must be
regarded as only one of the organisms in the human
constitution; that the existence of a fluid organism, an airy
organism, and a warmth organism must also be recognized.
Naturally, up to the warmth organism itself, everything is to
be conceived as physical body. But it is paramountly the
etheric body that takes hold of the fluid body, of everything
that is fluid in the human organism; in everything airy, the
astral body is paramountly active, and in the warmth
organism, the Ego. By recognizing this we can, as it were,
remain in the physical but at the same time reach up to the
spiritual.

We also
studied consciousness at its different levels. As I said
yesterday, it is usual to take account only of the
consciousness known to us in waking life from the moment of
waking to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the
objects around us and reason about these perceptions with our
intellect; we also have feelings in connection with these
perceptions, and we have our will impulses. But we experience
this whole nexus of consciousness as something which, in its
qualities, differs completely from the physical which alone
is taken account of by ordinary science.

It is not
possible, without further ado, to build a bridge from these
imponderable, incorporeal experiences in the domain of
consciousness to the other objects of perception studied in
physiology or physical anatomy. In regard to consciousness
too, we know from ordinary life that in addition to the
waking consciousness, there is dream consciousness, and we
heard yesterday that dreams are essentially pictures or
symbols of inner organic processes. Something is going on
within us all the time, and in our dreams it comes to
expression in pictures. I said that we may dream of coiling
snakes when we have some intestinal disorder, or we may dream
of an excessively hot stove and wake up with palpitations of
the heart. The overheated stove symbolized irregular beating
of the heart, the snakes symbolized the intestines, and so
forth. Dreams point us to our organism. The consciousness of
dreamless sleep is, as it were, an experience of nullity, of
the void. But I explained that this experience of the void is
necessary in order that we feel ourselves connected with our
bodily nature. As an Ego we would feel no connection with our
body if we did not leave it during sleep and seek for it
again on waking. It is through the deprivation undergone
between falling asleep and waking that we are able to feel
ourselves united with the body. So from the ordinary
consciousness which has really nothing to do with our own
essential being beyond the fact that it enables us to have
perceptions and ideas, we are led to the dream-consciousness
which has to do with actual bodily processes. We are
therefore led to the body. We are led to the body even more
strongly when we pass into the consciousness of dreamless
sleep.

Thus we can
say: On the one hand our conception of the life of soul is
such that it leads us to the body. And our conception of the
bodily constitution, comprising as it does the fluid
organism, the airy organism, the warmth organism and thus
becoming by degrees more rarefied, leads us to the realm of
soul. It is absolutely necessary to take these things into
consideration if we are to reach a view of the world that can
really satisfy us.

The great
question with which we have been concerning ourselves for
weeks, the cardinal question in one's conception of the
world, is this: How is the moral world order connected with
the physical world order? As has been said so often, the
prevailing world view — which relies entirely upon
natural science for knowledge of the outer physical world
— can only resort to earlier religious beliefs when it
is a matter of any comprehensive understanding of the life of
soul. In modern psychology there really is no longer any such
understanding — this world view is unable to build a
bridge. There, on the one side, is the physical world;
according to contemporary views this is a conglomeration from
a primeval nebula and everything will eventually become a
kind of slag heap in the universe. This is the picture of the
evolutionary process presented to us by the science of today,
and it is the one and only picture in which a really honest
modern scientist can find reality.

Within this
picture there is no room for a moral world order. It is there
on its own. One receives the moral impulses into oneself as
impulses of soul. But if the assertions of natural science
are true, that first everything was astir with life, then
finally the human being emerged out of the primeval nebula
and only then the moral ideals well up within. And when, as
is alleged, the world becomes a slag heap, this will also be
the graveyard of all moral ideals. They will have vanished.
— No bridge can possibly be built, and what is worse,
modern science cannot, without being inconsistent, admit the
existence of morality in the world order. Only if modern
science is inconsistent can it accept the moral world order
as valid. It cannot do so if it is consistent. The root of
all this is that the only kind of anatomy in existence is
concerned exclusively with the solid organism and no account
is taken of the fact that the human being also has a fluid
organism, an airy organism, and a warmth organism. If you
picture to yourselves that as well as the solid organism with
its configuration into bones, muscles, nerve fibers and so
forth, you also have a fluid organism and an airy
organism—though these are of course fluctuating and
inwardly mobile — and a warmth organism, if you picture
this you will more easily understand what I shall now have to
say on the basis of spiritual-scientific observation.

Think of a
person whose soul is fired with enthusiasm for a high moral
ideal, for the ideal of generosity, of freedom, of goodness,
of love, or whatever it may be. That person may also feel
enthusiasm for examples of the practical expression of these
ideals. But nobody can conceive that the enthusiasm which
fires the soul penetrates into the bones and muscles as
described by modern physiology or anatomy. If you really take
counsel with yourself, however, you will find it quite
possible to conceive that when one has enthusiasm for a high
moral ideal, this enthusiasm has an effect upon the warmth
organism. — There, you see, we have come from the realm
of soul into the physical!

Taking this
as an example, we may say: Moral ideals come to expression in
an enhancement of warmth in the warmth organism. Not only is
one warmed in soul through what is experienced in the way of
moral ideals, but one becomes organically warmer as well
— though this is not so easy to prove with physical
instruments. Moral ideals, then, have a stimulating,
invigorating effect upon the warmth organism. You must think
of this as a real and concrete happening: enthusiasm for a
moral ideal — stimulation of the warmth organism. There
is more vigorous activity in the warmth organism when the
soul is fired by a moral ideal.

Neither does
this remain without effect upon the rest of one's
constitution. As well as the warmth organism there is also
the air organism. We inhale and exhale the air; but during
the inbreathing and outbreathing process the air is within
us. It is of course inwardly in movement, in fluctuation, but
equally with the warmth organism it is an actual air organism
in us. Warmth, quickened by a moral ideal, works in turn upon
the air organism, because warmth permeates the whole human
organism, permeates every part of it. The effect upon the air
organism is not that of warming only, for when the warmth,
stimulated in the warmth organism, works upon the air
organism, it imparts to it something that I can only call a
source of light. Sources of light, as it were, are
imparted to the air organism, so that moral ideals which have
a stimulating effect upon the warmth organism produce sources
of light in the air organism. To external perception and for
ordinary consciousness these sources of light are not in
themselves luminous, but they manifest in the astral body. To
begin with, they are curbed — if I may use this
expression — through the air that is within us. They
are, so to speak, still dark light, in the sense that the
seed of a plant is not yet the developed plant. Nevertheless
we have a source of light within us through the fact that we
can be fired with enthusiasm for moral ideals, for moral
impulses.

We also have
within us the fluid organism. Warmth, stimulated in the
warmth organism by moral ideals, produces in the air organism
what may be called a source of light which remains, to begin
with, curbed and hidden. Within the fluid organism —
because everything in the human constitution interpenetrates
— a process takes place which underlies the outer tone
conveyed in the air. I said that the air is only the body of
the tone, and anyone who regards the essential reality of
tone as a matter of vibrations of the air, speaks of tones
just as he would speak of a person as having nothing except
the outwardly visible physical body. The air with its
vibrating waves is nothing but the outer body of the tone. In
the human being this tone, this spiritual tone, is
not produced in the air organism through the moral ideal, but
in the fluid organism. The sources of tone, therefore, arise
in the fluid organism.

We regard the
solid organism as the densest of all, as the one that
supports and bears all the others. Within it, too, something
is produced as in the case of the other organisms. In the
solid organism there is produced what we call a seed of
life — but it is an etheric, not a
physical, seed of life such as issues from the female
organism at a birth. This etheric seed which lies in the
deepest levels of subconsciousness is actually the primal
source of tone and, in a certain sense, even the source of
light. This is entirely hidden from ordinary consciousness,
but it is there within us.

Think of all
the experiences in your life that came from aspiration for
moral ideas — be it that they attracted you merely as
ideas, or that you saw them coming to expression in others,
or that you felt inwardly satisfied by having put such
impulses into practice, by letting your deeds be fired by
moral ideals — all this goes down into the air organism
as a source of light, into the fluid organism as a
source of tone, into the solid organism as a source
of life.

These
processes are withdrawn from the field of our normal
consciousness but they are active nevertheless. They become
free when we lay aside our physical body at death. What is
thus produced in us through moral ideals, or through the
loftiest and purest ideas, does not bear immediate fruit. For
during the life between birth and death, moral ideas as such
become fruitful only insofar as we remain in the life of
ideas, and insofar as we feel a certain satisfaction in moral
deeds performed. But this is merely a matter of remembrance,
and has nothing to do with what actually penetrates down into
the different organisms as the result of enthusiasm for moral
ideals.

So we see
that our whole constitution, beginning with the warmth
organism, is, as a matter of fact, permeated by moral ideals.
And when at death the etheric body, the astral body, and the
Ego emerge from the physical body, these higher members of
our human nature are filled with all the impressions we have
had. Our Ego was living in the warmth organism when it was
quickened by moral ideas. We were living in our air organism,
into which were implanted sources of light which
now, after death, go forth into the cosmos together with us.
In our fluid organism, tone was kindled which now
becomes part of the Music of the Spheres, resounding from us
into the cosmos. And we bring life with us when we
pass out into the cosmos through the portal of death.

You will now
begin to have an inkling of what the life that permeates the
universe really is. Where are the sources of life? They lie
in that which quickens those moral ideals which fire us with
enthusiasm. We come to the point of saying to ourselves that
if today we allow ourselves to be inspired by moral ideals,
these will carry forth life, tone and light into the universe
and will become world-creative. We carry out into the
universe world-creative power, and the source of this power
is the moral element.

So when we
study the whole human being we find a bridge between
moral ideals and what works as life-giving force in the
physical world, even in the chemical sense. For tone works in
the chemical sense by assembling substances and dispersing
them again. Light in the world has its source in the moral
stimuli, in the warmth organisms of human beings. Thus we
look into the future — new worlds take shape. And as in
the case of the plant we must go back to the seed, so in the
case of these future worlds that will come into being, we
must go back to the seeds which lie in us as moral
ideals.

And now think
of theoretical ideas in contrast to moral ideals. In the case
of theoretical ideas everything is different, no matter how
significant these ideas may be, for theoretical ideas produce
the very opposite effect to that of moral ideals They
cool down the warmth organism — that is the
difference.

Moral ideas,
or ideas of a moral-religious character, which fire us with
enthusiasm and become impulses for deeds, work as
world-creative powers. Theoretical ideas and speculations
have a cooling, subduing effect upon the warmth organism.
Because this is so, they also have a paralyzing
effect upon the air organism and upon the source of light
within it; they have a deadening effect upon tone,
and an extinguishing effect upon life. In our
theoretical ideas the creations of the pre-existing world
come to their end. When we formulate theoretical ideas a
universe dies in them. Thus do we bear within us the death of
a universe and the dawn of a universe.

Here we come
to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of
the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the
conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. It is
simply not true that matter is conserved forever.[1] Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a
zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of
nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical
thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not
continually die in us, we should not be human in the true
sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with
self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe.
But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become
conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this
that makes us human.

A past world
dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is
only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do
not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth.
Through our theoretical thinking, matter —
substantiality — is brought to its end; through our
pictorial thinking, matter and cosmic energy are
imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary
of the human skin is connected with the dying and birthing of
worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are
connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm
of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.

Moral Ideals

stimulate the warmth organism.
producing in the air organism — sources of
Light.
producing in the fluid organism — sources of
Tone.
producing in the solid organism — seeds of Life.
(etheric)

Theoretical thoughts

cool down the warmth
organism.paralyze the sources of Light.deaden the sources of Tone.extinguish Life.

Because of
unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the
imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy
were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be
no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this
truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so,
because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral
world-order — which in actual fact it does by speaking
of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If
matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral
world-order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can
understand the course of the world's development only if we
grasp how out of this 'illusory' moral world order —
for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds
come into being.

Nothing of
this can be grasped if we study only the solid component of
man's constitution. To understand it we must pass from the
solid organism through the fluid and airy organisms to the
warmth organism. Our connection with the universe can be
understood only if the physical is traced upwards to that
rarefied state wherein the soul can be directly active in the
rarefied physical element, as for example in warmth. Then it
is possible to find the connection between body and soul.

However many
treatises on psychology may be written — if they are
based upon what is studied today in anatomy and physiology it
will not be possible to find any transition to the life of
soul from this solid, or solid-fluid bodily constitution. The
life of soul will not be revealed as such. But if the bodily
substance is traced back to warmth, a bridge can be built
from what exists in the body as warmth to what works from out
of the soul into the warmth in the human organism.

There is
warmth both outside and inside the human organism. As we have
heard, in the human constitution warmth is an organism; the
soul, the soul and spirit, takes hold of this warmth organism
and by way of the warmth all that becomes active which we
inwardly experience as the moral. By the ‘moral’
I do not of course mean what Philistines mean by it, but I
mean the moral in its totality, that is to say, all those
impulses that come to us, for example when we contemplate the
majesty of the universe, when we say to ourselves: We are
born out of the cosmos and we are responsible for what goes
on in the world. — I mean the impulses that come to us
when the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science inspires us
to work for the sake of the future. When we regard Spiritual
Science itself as a source of the moral, this, more than
anything else, can fill us with enthusiasm for the moral, and
this enthusiasm, born of spiritual-scientific knowledge,
becomes in itself a source of morality in the higher sense.
But what is generally called 'moral' represents no more than
a subordinate sphere of the moral in the universal sense.

All the ideas
we evolve about the external world, about Nature in her
finished array, are theoretical ideas. No matter with what
exactitude we envisage a machine in terms of mathematics and
the principles of mechanics, or the universe in the sense of
the Copernican system — this is nothing but theoretical
thinking, and the ideas thus formulated constitute a force of
death within us; a corpse of the universe is within us in the
form of thoughts, of ideas.

These matters
create deeper and deeper insight into the universe in its
totality. There are not two orders, a natural order and a
moral order in juxtaposition, but the two are one. This is a
truth that must be realized by us today. Otherwise we must
ever and again be asking ourselves: How can any moral
impulses take effect in a world in which a natural order
alone prevails? — This indeed was the terrible problem
that weighed upon thinkers in the nineteenth century and
early twentieth century: How is it possible to conceive of
any transition from the natural world into the moral world,
from the moral world into the natural world?—The fact
is that nothing can help to solve this perplexing, fateful
problem except spiritual-scientific insight into Nature on
the one side and into the Spirit on the other.

With the
premises yielded by this knowledge we shall also be able to
get to the root of something that is presented as a branch of
science today and has already penetrated into the general
consciousness of mankind. Our worldview today is based upon
Copernicanism. Until the year 1827 the Copernican conception
of the universe which was elaborated by Kepler and then
diluted into theory by Newton, was tabooed by the Roman
Catholic Church. No orthodox Catholic was allowed to believe
it. Since that year the prohibition has been lifted and the
Copernican view of the universe has taken root so strongly in
the general consciousness that anyone who does not base his
own worldview upon it is regarded as a fool.

What is this
Copernican picture of the universe? — It is in reality
a picture built up purely on the basis of mathematical
principles, mathematical-mechanical principles. The rudiments
of it began, very gradually, to be unfolded in
Greece[2] where, however, echoes of
earlier thought — for example in the Ptolemaic view of
the universe — still persisted. And in the course of
time this developed into the Copernican system that is taught
nowadays to every child.

We can look
back from this world-conception to ancient times when the
prevailing picture of the universe was very different. All
that has remained of it are those traditions which in the
form in which they exist today — in astrology and the
like — are sheer dilettantism. That is what has
remained of ancient astronomy, and it has also remained,
ossified and immobilized, in the symbols of certain secret
societies, Masonic societies and the like. There is usually
complete ignorance of the fact that these things are relics
of an ancient astronomy. This ancient astronomy was quite
different from that of today, for it was based, not upon
mathematical principles but upon ancient clairvoyant
vision.

Entirely
false ideas prevail today of how an earlier humanity acquired
its astronomical-astrological knowledge. This was acquired
through an instinctive-clairvoyant vision of the universe.
The earliest Post-Atlantean peoples saw the heavenly bodies
as spirit forms, spirit entities, whereas we today regard
them merely as physical structures. When the ancient peoples
spoke of the celestial bodies, of the planets or of the fixed
stars, they were speaking of spiritual beings.
Today, the sun is pictured as a globe of burning gas which
radiates light into the universe. But for the people of
ancient times the sun was a living Being and they regarded
the sun, which their eyes beheld, simply as the outward
manifestation of this Spirit Being at the place where the sun
stands in the universe; and it was the same in regard to the
other heavenly bodies — they were seen as Spirit
Beings. We must think of an age which came to an end long
before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when the sun out
yonder in the universe and everything in the stars was
conceived of as living spirit reality, living Being.

Then came an
intermediary period when people no longer had this vision,
when they regarded the planets, at any rate, as physical, but
still thought of them as pervaded by living souls. In times
when it was no longer known how the physical passes over by
stages into what is of the soul, how what is of the soul
passes over by stages into the physical, how in reality the
two are united, people postulated physical existence on the
one side and soul existence on the other. They thought of the
correspondences between these two realms just as most
psychologists today — if they admit the existence of a
soul at all — still think, namely that the soul and the
physical nature of the human being are identical. This, of
course, leads thought to absurdity; or there is the so-called
‘psycho-physical parallelism’, which again is
nothing else than a stupid way of formulating something that
is not understood.

Then came the
age when the heavenly bodies were regarded as physical
structures, circling or stationary, attracting or repelling
one another in accordance with mathematical laws. To be sure,
in every epoch there existed a knowledge — in earlier
times a more instinctive knowledge — of how things are
in reality. But in the present age this instinctive knowledge
no longer suffices; what in earlier times was known
instinctively must now be acquired by conscious
effort. And if we inquire how those who were able to
view the universe in its totality — that is to say, in
its physical, psychical and spiritual aspects — if we
inquire how these people pictured the sun, we must say: They
pictured it first and foremost as a Spirit-Being. Those who
were initiated conceived of this Spirit-Being as the source
of the moral. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
I have said that 'moral intuitions' are drawn from this
source — but drawn from it in the earthly world, for
the moral intuitions shine forth from us, from what can live
in us as enthusiasm for the moral.

Think of how
greatly our responsibility is increased when we realize: If
here on the earth there were no soul capable of being fired
with enthusiasm for true and genuine morality, for the
spiritual moral order in general, nothing could be
contributed towards the progress of our world, towards a new
creation; our world would be led towards its death.

This force of
light that is on the earth (diagram VII)
rays out into the universe. This is, to begin with,
imperceptible to ordinary vision; we do not perceive how
human moral impulses ray out from the earth into the
universe. If a grievous age were to dawn over the earth, an
age when millions and millions of people would perish through
lack of spirituality — spirituality conceived of here
as including the moral, which indeed it does — if there
were only a dozen people filled with moral enthusiasm, the
earth would still ray out a spiritual, sun-like force! This
force rays out only to a certain distance. At this point it
mirrors itself, as it were, in itself, so that here (diagram VIII) there arises the reflection of what
radiates from humans. And in every epoch the
initiates regarded this reflection as the sun. For as I have
so often said, there is nothing physical here. Where ordinary
astronomy speaks of the existence of an incandescent globe of
gas, there is merely the reflection of a spiritual reality in
physical appearance.

You see,
therefore, how great is the distance separating the
Copernican view of the world, and even the old astrology,
from what was the inmost secret of Initiation. The best
illustration of these things is provided by the fact that in
an epoch when great power was vested in the hands of groups
of people, who, as they declared, considered that such truths
were dangerous for the masses and did not wish them to be
communicated, one who was an idealist — the Emperor
Julian (called for this reason ‘the Apostate’)
— wanted to impart these truths to the world and was
then brought to his death by cunning means. There are reasons
which induce certain occult societies to withhold vital
secrets of world-existence, because by so doing they are able
to wield a certain power. If in the days of the Emperor
Julian certain occult societies guarded their secrets so
strictly that they acquiesced in his murder, it need not
surprise us if those who are the custodians of certain
secrets today do not reveal them but want to withhold them
from the masses in order to enhance their power — it
need not surprise us if such people hate to realize that at
least the beginnings of such secrets are being unveiled. And
now you will understand some of the deeper reasons for the
bitter hatred that is leveled against Spiritual Science,
against what Spiritual Science feels it a duty to bring to
mankind at the present time. But we are living in an age when
either earthly civilization will be doomed to perish, or
certain secrets will be restored to mankind — truths
which hitherto have in a certain way been guarded as secrets,
which were once revealed to people through instinctive
clairvoyance but must now be reacquired by fully conscious
vision, not only of the physical but also of the spiritual
that is within the physical.

What was the
real aim of Julian the Apostate? — He wished to make
clear to the people: You are becoming more and more
accustomed to look only at the physical sun; but there is a
spiritual Sun of which the physical sun is only the
mirror-image! In his own way he wished to communicate the
Christ-Secret to the world. But in our age it is desired that
the connection of Christ, the spiritual Sun, with the
physical sun, shall be kept hidden. That is why certain
authorities rage most violently of all when we speak of the
Christ Mystery in connection with the Sun Mystery. All kinds
of calumnies are then spread abroad. — But Spiritual
Science is assuredly a matter of importance in the present
age, and those alone who regard it as such view it with the
earnestness that is its due.